Still Wakes the Deep is a horror gem that won’t get out of my head

polygon.com:

The best horror games stick around long after credits have rolled, squirming in and tickling the back of your brain. Still Wakes the Deep has stuck around in my noggin, provoking questions that I know I will never have the answers to. There are plenty of familiar elements in Still Wakes the Deep, and in less deft hands, it could come off as derivative or redundant. But the atmosphere, the characters, and the restraint exercised by developer The Chinese Room all come together to create a special four-hour experience that I can’t forget.

Still Wakes the Deep takes place on a Scottish oil rig in 1975. The protagonist, Caz McLeary, is dodging an assault charge by taking a position here. The game gives us a little bit of exposition via a letter from Caz’s wife, and then we’re off to meet some of Caz’s co-workers. There’s a whole crew of boisterous blue-collar workers here, but we only get a couple of quick conversations with most of them before shit hits the fan. The voice acting is superb and very Scottish, so it might be worth turning on subtitles (if you aren’t familiar with Scottish accents) to catch the intricacies of these conversations.

A greedy manager insists the oil rig drill down into something that feels “off” to the workers, and something ancient awakens. Some crew members die, others are injured, and some are trapped under wreckage or in a diving bell. The early game is a very industrial horror experience, and Caz’s electrical skills are essential to try and salvage things. It’s chaotic, but the crew guesses at first that it was an air pocket or some similar, mundane catastrophe. They’ll soon be proven wrong, but the crew’s initial reactions set a tone of fear very well.

From here, Caz is tasked with trying to help as many of his colleagues survive as possible. One early scene that sticks with me is of a rookie diver, stuck in a diving bell, screaming incoherently. His partner, distraught with grief and guilt, is trying to get him out. At the time, this